Recent flooding and water outages have highlighted the need for national infrastructure and disaster preparedness to be upgraded for the sake of the tourism industry.
Colin Jordan, President of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association assured that the industry learned a few lessons from the recent incidents and that the Association is working with its members to move the infrastructure of the tourism industry to a level where it can cope with these issues more effectively in the future.
Part of this move will be to ensure that hotels, restaurants and other tourism businesses have water tanks with enough storage capacity so as to be able to satisfy most of their guests’ needs in a situation similar to what occurred recently.
Jordan stated that while the Association and its members are committed to doing what they can to help themselves, the overall solution lies with the improving of national infrastructure. He highlighted mainly the Barbados Water Authority’s Mains Replacement Programme.
“We know that the Barbados Water Authority has a Mains Replacement Programme and we are aware that that is a large programme that is going to take lots of money and it is going to take lots of time. But we would want to say that that kind of a programme really needs to be pushed, it needs to start and to have some momentum because we sell Barbados as a country that works, a country with good infrastructure and when we get situations like these, even though we as Barbadians understand what is happening, we have to understand that we are dealing with our bread and butter, the lifeblood of the country and that infrastructure programme, that Mains Replacement Programme really needs to be placed high on the agenda.”
